Clifford Stoll
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"Clifford Paul "Cliff" Stoll" is an American astronomer and author. He is best known for his pursuit of hacker Markus Hess in 1986 and the subsequent 1989 book, The Cuckoo's Egg, which details his investigation. Stoll has written a total of three books as well as technology articles in the non-specialist press (e.g., in Scientific American on the Curta calculator/Curta mechanical calculator and the slide rule).

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Human kindness, warmth, interaction, friendship, and family are far more important than anything that can come across my cathode-ray tube.

A box of crayons and a big sheet of paper provides a more expressive medium for kids than computerized paint programs.

Here are my strong reservations about the wave of computer networks. They isolate us from one another and cheapen the meaning of actual experience. They work against literacy and creativity. They undercut our schools and libraries.

It's a great medium for trivia and hobbies, but not the place for reasoned, reflective judgment. Suprisingly often, discussions degenerate into acrimony, insults and flames.

Merely that I have a World Wide Web page does not give me any power, any abilities, nor any status in the real world.

While I admire the insights of many of the people in the world of computing, I get this cold feeling that I speak a different language.

Treat your password like your toothbrush. Don't let anybody else use it, and get a new one every six months.

If you don't have an E-mail address, you're in the Netherworld. If you don't have your own World Wide Web page, you're a nobody.

The problem with intelligent agents and filters is that they can never do anything more than a crude approximation of my desires and wants.

No computer network with pretty graphics can ever replace the salespeople that make our society work.

Call me a troglodyte; I'd rather peruse those photos alongside my sweetheart, catch the newspaper on the way to work, and page thorough a real book.

As the networks evolve, so do my opinions toward them, and my divergent feelings bring out conflicting points of view. In advance, I apologize to those who expect a consistent position from me.

I spend almost as much time figuring out what's wrong with my computer as I do actually using it.

Why is it drug addicts and computer afficionados are both called users?

Anyone can post messages to the net. Practically everyone does. The resulting cacophony drowns out serious discussion.

Electronic communication is an instantaneous and illusory contact that creates a sense of intimacy without the emotional investment that leads to close friendships.

I sense an insatiable demand for connectivity. Maybe all these people have discovered important uses for the Internet. Perhaps some of them feel hungry for a community that our real neighborhoods don't deliver. At least a few must wonder what the big deal is.

The Internet has no such organization - files are made available at random locations. To search through this chaos, we need smart tools, programs that find resources for us.

When I'm online, I'm alone in a room, tapping on a keyboard, staring at a cathode-ray tube.

Spending an evening on the World Wide Web is much like sitting down to a dinner of Cheetos, two hours later your fingers are yellow and you're no longer hungry, but you haven't been nourished.

Computers force us into creating with our minds and prevent us from making things with our hands. They dull the skills we use in everyday life.